What is Assessment? And what’s the importance?

Assessments are used to collect data on knowledge, skill, attitudes, and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. As a student I use to think about assessment in a negative way, now that I am on the other side as a teacher I realize there is much more to assessment that what meets the eye. An assessment can tell you so much about a student if analyze and measured correctly. When I say measured correctly I am saying I feel that it is impossible to measure students accurately when they are all receiving the same exam. Yes we know that some students have test accommodation where they receive extended time, question read to them, etc. But what is lacking is having the assessment tailored to the student’s needs. I am not saying making the exam easier for them because then that would not be an accurate measure also. Each student learns differently so, therefore, I think it’s only fair that they get assess differently also. I was reading an article about questions to tackle when designing assessments. designing student assessment.  There were several things that stood out to me. One did your assessment provide student choice, and I thought to myself student choice from since when students get to have a choice in selected the type of assessment they take. When I read more into it I realize what it was saying and it made perfect sense. Having students involved in the designing of their assessment I believe is a great idea it allows students to more connected to their learning process. It helps students to build certain skills like self-assessment and effective decision-making. Involving students in the process of designing assessment and rubric helps empowering students learning it also will help the student to know exactly what to do and how their assessment is being graded. In the beginning teacher will have to guide students on how to create strong assessments and once students are comfortable and capable of creating assessment. Currently, at my school, we are preparing for our first Socratic seminar in math. During the Socratic seminar students will be analyzing each other work and grading them according to the rubric. Then, they are going to discuss the students’ work and the score that they receive and why they gave them that score they did. At first, we was questioning how can we do a Socratic seminar in math but, we later found out it is possible and now we are using it as a form of summative assessment. This helps target those students who struggle to write down their answers but can verbally express and walk you through solving a problem.   Another thing that stood out to me was do your assessments adapt to individual students in your classroom as needs arise? This goes back to what I mentioned above about having a tailored assessment for students. It should be a goal for us as teachers to want to do individualize assessments. I know you’re probably saying this woman is crazy this will be more work on us teachers. But, I do not look at it as more work I look at it as this benefiting my students and helping them be successful. The goal of individualizing assessments is to score the student against proficiency levels for any given learning objective or score them for growth versus their prior assessment data. To be successful at designing individualize assessment we as teachers must study and pinpoint what the student is struggling with, and then know what types of accommodations to implement. We as educators need to start looking at assessment as data that we can analyze and find ways to help better our students’ learning.